When I decided to take over Glassboard, I knew I was at the time biting off more than I could chew as a sole developer. Balancing a product that has three front-end clients, an API server, and tens of thousands of users while also working almost full-time as an iOS and Android contractor isn’t easy. Add on top of that, my existing suite of products and it’s a bit insane.

One of the things I said I would do when I decided to take on this adventure was to simplify and focus my work. I’ve always had a bit of ADD, which is why my suite of apps has ranged from text editors to GitHub clients to photo galleries.

In late 2013, none of these apps were necessarily setting the world on fire financially, but they had users that I wanted to try and do right by. I have spent the past several months working on finding new homes for each of them.

Committed

We announced that The Magical Panda acquired Committed a few months ago. Since the acquisition, Saul and friends have been hard at work squashing bugs and adding new features such as 2-factor authentication support for a more secure GitHub login experience.

Photos+

As of today, Silver Pine Software is the new home for Photos+, the pro’s photo browsing app I released back in December of last year. Photos+ is an app I always wanted personally. I had a pretty large roadmap for where I wanted to take Photos+ in terms of functionality, but being able to realize that feature set and work on Glassboard simultaneously is nearly impossible.

I handed Silver Pine my roadmap as a source of feedback on where I think they should take the product, but it’s totally theirs to do as they see fit. I am happy, however, that their 1.1 release includes support for browsing your Dropbox photo library: by far the biggest thing I wanted to add from day one.

Elements

I was unable to secure a buyer for Elements unfortunately, so it has been discontinued. Sales of Elements have not been more than lunch money and enough to cover paying my support minions for almost a year.

As much as I enjoyed working on it, the market for a paid Dropbox text editor has passed. It’s become too saturated and too mature to reasonably think you can make a decent living from it.

To the Elements fans still using the app, my apologies, but I’m a firm believer in not keeping an app around to rot over time. The good news is that there are dozens of great competitors out there you can choose from.

Focusing On Glassboard

This is it. I’m all in on Glassboard. I don’t have any other products to fall back on or bring in supplemental income.

Google is big on talking about taking moonshots with their self-driving cars, Glass, and terrifying life like robots. These are big ideas, but I wouldn’t say they are moonshots because the company is still almost entirely funded by their insane ad revenue. If self-driving cars or evil robots don’t pan out, they’re going to be fine.

I’m taking a moonshot. Glassboard is a giant undertaking and the biggest risk of my career. It’s a make or break decision that will likely shape the next decade of my career.

I’m working full-time right now to try and launch the first piece of my Glassboard overhaul this summer. At that point, I’ll start to have a pretty good idea whether this was a good idea, or whether I’m going to be heading to the local McDonalds looking for a job.